Server outage: Apple’s Siri apologizing to iPhone 4S owners

The servers that Apple uses to process Siri commands appear to be down for many iPhone 4S users across the US on Thursday afternoon. Reports of the suspected outage began popping up on Twitter starting at around 2pm Eastern Time and have been ramping up ever since, though not everyone who owns an iPhone 4S has been getting errors.

The problems seem to be carrier agnostic; when users ask Siri a question or try to use Siri to perform a task, the virtual assistant responds with, "Sorry I am having trouble connecting to the network." Apple has not yet confirmed publicly whether the phenomenon is on the server-side or not—we have inquired, and have not yet heard back as of publication time—but VentureBeat spoke to an AppleCare technician who acknowledged that it's possible that Siri is experiencing an outage.

Ina Fried from All Things D tweeted during the hubbub that she was able to successfully perform a Siri query, but her experience appears to be uncommon at the moment. Has anyone else had success with Siri during this apparent outage? We'll update if and when we hear back from Apple, but for the time being, we wouldn't count on Siri setting up reminders or appointments for you. Guess you'll have to do those the old fashioned way—via your live human personal assistant, that is. (Just kidding!)